Robert Charroux

Robert Charroux was the best-known pen-name of Robert Joseph Grugeau (April 7, 1909 – June 24, 1978). He was a French author known for his writings on the ancient astronaut theme.

Charroux worked for the French post office and wrote eight works of fiction between 1942-1946 using the pseudonym Saint-Saviol. He also wrote the scripts for a French comic strip, Atomas, about an atomic-powered superhero, appearing in the weekly magazine Mon Journal in the late 1940s. For the same magazine Charroux wrote a science fiction adventure in serial form, "Prof. Barthelemy's Flying Island." He first began using the pseudonym Charroux in 1942, that became his regular pseudonym from 1962 onwards.

Robert Charroux married Yvette Bernuchot in April 1930. They lived in rue St Sulpice in Paris during the late 1950s.

In 1976 he began making plans to be buried in the cemetery of Charroux.

Charroux was a pioneer of the theory of ancient astronauts, publishing at least six non-fiction works in this genre in the last decade of his life, including One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History (1963, 1970), Forgotten Worlds (1973), Masters of the World (1974), The Gods Unknown (1974) and Legacy of the Gods (1974).

The influence that Charroux's first work (in its 1963 version) had on Erich Von Däniken's first books (ca. 1966), as well as the influence that Von Däniken's early books had on Charroux, is widely appreciated, but Von Däniken seems to have been equally familiar with an earlier French work, The Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (1960), which is likely to have been a direct inspiration for both Charroux and Von Däniken. Charroux's publisher contacted Von Däniken's in March 1968 concerning evidence of plagiarism, with the result that later printings of Chariots of the Gods and Return to the Stars at least mentioned Charroux in the bibliography.

Charroux's theories concerning Ancient Astronauts were criticised by French archaeologist Jean-Pierre Adam in 1975. His works have been described as pseudohistory.

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